Painted Gold-Trimmed Easter Eggs

Easter is just around the corner and I finally had a chance to design some Easter Eggs. I wanted to use some paper maché eggs that I had thrifted and to try using a rather unusual collage material.

I began with some lovely French images from the Graphics Fairy. Now here is the unusual collage part, I had some {unused} toilet seat covers that were not properly die cut so as to make them impractical for their intended purpose. These were to be discarded from the office so I saved a couple of sheets to experiment with. I trimmed a seat cover into an 8" x 10 1/2" sheet and taped the corners to a standard piece of printer paper. I ran this through my inkjet printer to transfer the French graphics onto the very lightweight tissue surface.

I tore small sections of the tissue and used Mod Podge to create a collage on the eggs. I had to be careful because the tissue tends to disintegrate with moisture.

After the eggs were dry, I applied a light coat of Distress Paint.

To add some interest to the painted surface, I doodled on each egg using gold Sizzix InkSheets. I also added some gold ribbon, washi tape, lace and vintage buttons to finish off each egg.

This was the first time that I used the InkSheets and I could see some fun possibilities. I also learned that it is possible to print on very thin tissue. If you try using either technique, please add a comment and let me know what you think. Hope everyone had a fun weekend.

Happy Serendipity Thrifting Day!

I had a planned vacation day off from work last Friday and was fortunate to find an estate sale listing vintage buttons. It was truly a stroke of serendipity and it even got better!

While searching for the buttons I came across the most awesome stash of more Pyrex bowls. Not just any Pyrex bowls but a Green Dot Pyrex bowl, two yellow Rainbow Stripe bowls and one blue Rainbow Stripe bowl. You might remember my estate sale horror story of another buyer grabbing two Pyrex Dot bowls from me last year. The bowl that the seller took away from me was a Green Dot Pyrex bowl just like this one.

Wasn't it just last week that I said that I needed to stop buying so much Pyrex? This was an example of true serendipity though. Another buyer was standing near these and just walked away uninterested so I casually swooped in and happily bought them.

Tim Holtz and Pyrex in One Week!

This has been an awesome week which included a mini-workshop with Tim Holtz. He had us playing with all of his different surface materials to see how they perform. My absolute favorite was the Shiny Foil Transfer Sheets, the Distress Specialty Stamping Paper and Clearly for Art {moldable plastic film}.

He explained the surfaces and then let us play. We weren't supposed to create a final project but I ended up composing this quick piece using the Sizzix Layered Bee die and Texture Fade. Behind the large bee is a stamped butterfly using the gold transfer foil. The horizontal band is a piece of thin wood. The center of the background is embossed vellum. All of this is mounted on corrugated paper.

But wait! There's more fun to this week!